Alexander Bain was born of humble parents in the little town of Thurso, at the extreme north of Scotland, in the year 1811. At the age of twelve he went to hear a penny lecture on science which, according to his own account, set him thinking and influenced his whole future. Learning the art of clockmaking, he went to Edinburgh, and subsequently removed to London, where he obtained work in Clerkenwell, then famed for its clocks and watches. His first patent is dated January 11th, 1841, and is in the name of John Barwise, chronometer maker, and Alexander Bain, mechanist, Wigmore Street. It describes his electric clock in which there is an electro-magnetic pendulum, and the electric current is employed to keep it going instead of springs or weights. He improved on this idea in following patents, and also proposed to derive the motive electricity from an 'earth battery,' by burying plates of zinc and copper in the ground. Gauss and Steinheil had priority in this device which, owing to 'polarisation' of the plates and to drought, is not reliable. Long afterwards Mr. Jones of Chester succeeded in regulating timepieces from a standard astronomical clock by an improvement on the method of Bain. On December 21, 1841, Bain, in conjunction with Lieut. Thomas Wright, R.N., of Percival Street, Clerkenwell, patented means of applying electricity to control railway engines by turning off the steam, marking time, giving signals, and printing intelligence at different places. He also proposed to utilise 'natural bodies of water' for a return wire, but the earlier experimenters had done so, particularly Steinheil in 1838. The most important idea in the patent is, perhaps, his plan for inverting the needle telegraph of Ampere, Wheatstone and others, and instead of making the signals by the movements of a pivoted magnetic needle under the influence of an electrified coil, obtaining them by suspending a movable coil traversed by the current, between the poles of a fixed magnet, as in the later siphon recorder of Sir William Thomson. Bain also proposed to make the coil record the message by printing it in type; and he developed the idea in a subsequent patent. Next year, on December 31st, 1844, he projected a mode of measuring the speed of ships by vanes revolving in the water and indicating their speed on deck by means of the current. In the same specification he described a way of sounding the sea by an electric circuit of wires, and of giving an alarm when the temperature of a ship's hold reached a certain degree. The last device is the well-known fire-alarm in which the mercury of a thermometer completes an electric circuit, when it rises to a particular point of the tube, and thus actuates an electric bell or other alarm.